Teens At Risk Of Addiction

Drug abuse is one of the most common problems facing teens today, all across the world. We, three teenagers, will walk you through the biological, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of teen drug abuse. Why do teenagers do drugs? Why can't they s...

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Everything psychological is biological. Everything you think, feel, and do, is rooted in the processes of the brain. Your teens (like us) are no different, so why don't we start by examining teenage addiction in the context of neurobiology? To und...

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The limbic system of the brain (shown above to the right) is the home of many crucial brain structures pertaining to emotion, memory, and behavior. One of these structures is the reward circuit, which uses the neurotransmitter dopamine to reinforc...

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Over time, the brain adjusts to the drug by reducing the number of dopamine receptors (from the image on the left to the image on the right.) This makes it more difficult for teenagers to feel pleasure in normal tasks and forces them to take large...

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Some drugs, in addition to creating an addiction by stimulating the reward system, also damage the ability to control impulses, which is based in the frontal lobes. This makes it harder for teenagers that have become addicted to substances to brea...

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Although drugs affect every type of person adversely, they are especially harmful to teens as teenage brains are still not fully developed. One study found that drug abuse during the teenage years can impede critical growth in various cortices of ...

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The cognitive perspective is the psychological viewpoint that the focuses on the how people process, store, and retrieve information and how this information is used to reason and solve problems. The cognitive explanation delivers how do teenagers...

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The gambler's fallacy is the mistaken belief that, if something happens more frequently than normal, it will happen less frequently in the future. This fallacy can arise in teen drug abuse although it is most strongly associated with gambling wher...

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The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. It is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. It connects to teenagers because they stressed out with education, they ...

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The theory of planned behavior is a theory that links beliefs and behavior. The concept was proposed by Icek Ajzen to improve on the predictive power of the theory of reasoned action by including perceived behavioural control. It is applied to stu...

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It is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it mus...

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In addition to the biological and cognitive perspectives, drug abuse can also be analyzed from the sociocultural perspective of psychology, which looks at how people interact with and think of each other. The sociocultural perspective is closely r...

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Teens are easily influenced by their friends. Most tobacco smokers began due to a friend, and female teens are more at risk to become smokers because they often move in groups. One of the main reasons the teenage authors of this clipbook don't smo...

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Parents have an enormous influence on their children with regards to addiction. Parental disapproval of smoking makes an adolescent less likely to initiate smoking (like with us!), while being raised in a home where parents smoke exposes children ...

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As you can now see, teenage drug addiction is a very real problem. But like any other problem, it can be dealt with. By knowing the dangers and addressing them beforehand - reducing exposure to drugs, creating awareness, making a healthy home envi...